Chatter

06/11/2015

It’s on again with Oliver and his beloved, after a months-long fallow period in which she turned her attention to another boy. We have no idea what changed (O attributes it to his mad soccer moves) but the object of his affection asked him this week to once again be her boyfriend. She has not dropped the other boy as a result, we are told, but this is seemingly of no concern.

As a refresher, Girl is in Grade 2, and O is in Grade 1. This is part of a pattern. As early as three, Oliver was well aware of the allure of the older woman. At parks we would catch him gaping at six-year-old stunners, awed by their power. Even then, he had good taste. The girls he liked then, and now, have never had to be little Barbies or match their pink with more pink. Instead, they have had to rock their outfits and look a little undone. They are blessed with just the right kind of confidence, the kind that saves them from caring what other people think. These girls dart around the playground, usually trailed by a band of followers. They are neither overly nice nor overly mean. Heartbreakers.

So, yeah, Girl.

Last night before going to sleep, O asked me to tell him one of his favourite stories, the one where I’m 15 at the Dairy Queen with the guy I like: Jeff, who just happens to be 17. Jeff buys me a milkshake, brings it back to the table and sits down. I decide that the best strategy for making him love me is to bat my eyelashes. This is not as easy as you might think, because you don’t want to do it too often or you look crazy, and do want to look like you’re listening even as you’re batting. It’s a lot to coordinate—too much it turns out—since I end up pouring my milkshake down my shirt without even knowing it.

Ahahahaha! Poor mom! (Not so poor; Jeff became my first real boyfriend, and a good one at that.)

It’s time to go to sleep. No it’s not, says Oliver, not until I tell you a story. Fine.

“There’s this boy, in Grade 1, and this girl, in Grade 2, and they decide to be boyfriend [Oliver Dan, for some reason] and girlfriend [you know who]. So the boyfriend takes his girlfriend to a restaurant. She wants crouton salad with corn and tomatoes. He wants a hamburger. But the problem is that as the waitress is taking their orders, she sees how amazing and handsome Oliver Dan is, so she gets jealous and wants to be his girlfriend, too. But she can’t so instead she gets her vial of deadly poison and puts two drops on each of the boyfriend and girlfriend's meals, the salad and the burger. But what she doesn’t know is that Oliver Dan is really Cat Man and his girlfriend is Marvel Woman and they have superpowers that include not ever being able to die from poison. So the waitress was sad and they were alive.”

05/13/2014

What do you do when you're a lovely dad just walking to the park on a sunny day with your wife, your kids, and a couple of their friends, and your six-year-old son suddenly calls you an urgent penis? As in, "Hey, urgent penis!"

If you're Craig, you try very hard not to look at your wife who is doubled over. You halt, you raise your eyebrow, and you say, "Sorry, did you just call me an urgent penis?" "Yes," says the son, "And by the way, what does 'urgent' mean?"

02/25/2014

The kids are now 5 3/4 (Oliver) and just-3 (Georgia), and among other things, this means that it is very difficult to pee alone. For Georgia especially, who is in the final stages of potty-training, peeing and pooing are public events. She talks a mean streak about "privacy" and even uses it as a verb ("I am privacying right now") but it's hard to get that concept when your family whoops and claps every time you sit down on the potty and flings candy at you when you produce something there.

So, it follows that Georgia sees no need to remove herself from bathroom quarters when an adult needs to do their thing. I was tired today, though, and I really felt quite desperate for this measure of sanity. Craig was out dropping Oliver at school, and I pleaded with G for a solo pee. She agreed, to my surprise, and plonked herself right outside the door to wait.

11/11/2013

Soon, soon, I will be back here in earnest. Today, though, just a small moment to relay ...

This
morning I was driving Oliver (now 5 1/2) to school – the school that has only just
stopped feeling brand new and scary, two months in. It seems they have a
thing called "Star Student," where when one is good enough and quiet
enough and obedient enough one receives a cardboard crown and the big
title. A few of O's friends have received it but so far no headdress has
bedecked O's own head.

As often happens on a Monday, O
was a bit hyper and unsettled. I tried to centre him, focus his
intention by mentioning the Star Student scheme:

Me: "So, Star Student. Is this of interest to you? Are you trying for it? Where are we at on this one?"

O: "Ah yes, trying. Trying, trying, never happening."

I looked in the mirror to the backseat. There I found a small, perfect, mischievous smile far lovelier than a paper crown.

11/27/2012

Aaagh. So long without a post. Somehow my DNS settings got
reversed, whatever that means, and it took me forever to ask my friend Travis
from Hop Studios to fix it (which he did in an instant). Oliver is now
four-and-a-half and Georgia is 22 months, and everything’s turned up a notch
since I last wrote. Mostly, the sibling deal is ON. Till a couple of months
ago, Georgia was “baby” and Oliver thought she was cute and … kinda lumpish,
really. A creature to be loved, yes, but one with little actual play value.

This is not the case anymore. She is his sister and not his
baby anymore, and she can be teased and made to laugh and cry. What’s more, she
can tease and make him laugh and cry. He loves it. She loves it. And oh my God,
we love it. Georgia’s common refrain these days, delivered in a singsong voice,
is “Dada, mama, Ah-ver. Dada, mama, Ah-ver.”

We are enlisting O’s help when it comes to teaching Georgia
to talk. She’s got dozens of words and at least half of them we actually understand. O was enthusiastic from the get-go about helping, though he employs a slightly suspect teaching methodology. He simply thinks of a word, like
“usually,” and asks G if she can say it. “Ooo-ee,” she’ll say, much to his
delight, but of course it doesn’t mean anything. The other day I asked him if
he could maybe choose objects in the room he could point to so she could link
meaning to what she was saying. He was all up for this.

“Georgia,” he said, pointing to the light on the ceiling,
“Light. Georgia say, ‘light.’”

Georgie: “Chueugh.”

O: “What Georgie?”

Georgie: “Chahlghr.”

[Pause]

O: “Mama! She said ‘Chinese lantern!’”

Georgia has also apparently said “groundhog,” “curry,” and
“seatbelt” but perhaps I just don’t have a good ear.

Despite O’s kind guidance, Georgia is often a harsh judge of
his performance. Should he even hint at crying—say a whine is escalating—she
will move swiftly to his side, preferably with him prone on the floor. Not to
comfort. Not at all. Upon releasing the first note of distress, O will meet
with a small raised hand above his head. All too often, he won’t see the hand
for the warning it is—not soon enough, at least. Too often, he will linger a
little longer on the note, and then it will be too late: that hand will land
swiftly and sonorously on his head along with a stern and meaningful glare from
above. It is so funny, this tiny thing doling out the whoop-ass, that even O
cannot help but succumb to the giggles and forget how much he wanted to cry.

For now. Georgia’s days as the untouchable half-babe,
half-girl will soon be over, but my, we are enjoying them.

06/06/2012

Bittersweet: the adorable foreshadowing of adulthood. Today, I picked up O with G and he came out of the schoolyard door in tears. Beloved Mr. T had removed his outside privileges after O was mean to another child. I concurred with Mr. T, which launched wailing half the way home. When we got in the door, O said, “It was NOT a good day.”

I replied, “Was it maybe a good day till you pushed Dmitri?”

“No,” said O, “It started before that. I was NOT able to complete my picture for my portfolio. I was not allowed to open my jam at lunch. I could not find the book I had brought for show and tell.”

“Oh,” said I.

“THAT,” said O, “Was my day.”

I wanted to buy him a martini but he had no money and we don’t keep gin in the freezer. We settled on a fruit-juice-sweetened gummy bear. It was totally inadequate.

04/24/2012

Oliver woke up yesterday dreaming of a better world. Or, that’s one interpretation of it. His first intelligible sentence post-slumber:

“How do you know that the lion and the lamb are enemies?”

“Pardon?

“The lion and the lamb. Maybe they’re not enemies.”

We had not one idea from whence the question sprung, though we had talked about natural friends and enemies of cougars the day before. We aren’t religious, so Oliver’s taking it to the level of the lion and the lamb deserved a little Google. I looked up “the lion will lay down with the lamb” and it turns out of course that the idea is symbolic of “the peace that will pervade the entire earth.”

We now know that Oliver is prescient and that he will likely be a preacher. He may speak of punching various people in the eyeball should they mess with him and be practicing his karate chops and kicks for his four-year-old birthday party this Saturday but this is just a ruse. Stay tuned.

07/06/2011

Okay, I know the thrill, the hysteria really, of mentioning the unmentionables. Of scatalogical humour. I think it was pounded literally into my head by my brother’s bum when we were growing up: I cannot count the number of times he pinned me down to fart on my head. I get it, and I still laugh at potty jokes despite myself.

So I do empathize with Oliver’s current fascination with all things related to bums or genitalia, especially as material for comedy. The best jokes always relate somehow to the taboo. And Oliver is three, a time when body parts hitherto unexplored are suddenly irresistible. But there is a limit, and we are reaching it.

The other day, when informed that the day’s summer camp activities would involve going swimming at a public wading pool:

05/30/2011

When Oliver turned three last month, he really took it upon himself to shake off the lowly two’s and assume his rightful place as a big boy. He wished the year adieu—“Goodbye, two,” he said solemnly, walking on Elgin Street the morning of his birthday—and, as if he had it all mapped out, he updated his persona and activities to suit the new times.

In particular, Oliver is done with simple declarations and plain old fart and poo jokes. The latter will always entertain (duh!), but he’s now experimenting with more sophisticated humour, word play, and stories. I don’t think we’re alone, as parents, in delighting in the awkward, foreign weight of the “adultisms” (my word for the throwaway phrases we all get used to using) he’s peppering into his language.

It started with “actually”:

“Actually, I’ll have raisins with my oatmeal.”

“Actually, these are not pants, they’re jeans.”

“Actually, is my Spiderman mask still in the Jesus dryer?”

Okay, maybe not the Jesus part, but you get the gist of it.

Now he’s progressed to reminding me of things (not a bad idea):

O: “I’d like to remind you of something, mama.”

Me: “Yes?”

O: “I’d like to remind you that when I was a baby, when I was just borned, my titi [his penis] was attached to your bellybutton by a string.”

Me: “Well, not your titi so much as your bellybutton, kind of.”

O: “Mama, I’d like to remind you that when I was a baby, my bellybutton was attached …kind of … to your ... bellybutton ... by a string. [Pause] Why mama? Why?”

Me: [Pause] [Pause] “Thank you for reminding me, Oliver.”

It’s with gusto, too, that O is trotting out his new sense of language. Gusto and a touch of sanctimony. For about a year, I have neglected to tell Oliver that his pronunciation of “orangutan,” that smelly jungle swinger, is well, wrong. That’s because his own version is so danged cute: “tangorang.” But now that he’s all big and worldly, I felt I owed him the truth the other night when one of the monkeys appeared in a bedtime story. I was a little nervous about what his reaction would be; he’s not in love with being corrected (a trait inherited from his father). I needn’t have fretted.

Me: “Oliver, you know that, actually, that monkey is an O-RANG-A-TAN? An O, RANG, A, TAN, you know?”

O, with the merest of blinks: “Yes, or, ‘Tangorang,’ mama. ‘Tangorang’ for short."

That was a peaceful night. On not so peaceful nights, sometimes we offer Craig up as a threat to O for bad behaviour. Is this a good idea? No. Will it scar their relationship forever? Maybe. But it does make for some good humour. For example, when Oliver was wriggling madly out of protest on our insistence he get in the bath the other night, we informed him that Craig would go to sleep with him rather than me if he didn’t hop in pronto. His response:

“Go to bed with dada? [Pause]. Not mama? [Pause] We can’t have THAT!”

Three is definitely, for us, the transition from O’s merely enjoying communicating and acquiring words to really playing with them and exploring concepts. One of these concepts is friendship. He definitely associates friends with good things. When he and Craig were traipsing through Halifax’s beautiful Public Gardens on Spring Road a couple of weeks ago, he noted, “I used to live here with my friends.” Hmm. And whenever he sees kids his age when we’re out walking, whether he knows them or not, he says, “Those are friends of mines [sic].”

No matter how much of a big boy Oliver is now and sophisticated with language, there’s one concept he can’t grasp; but none of us can. We had to put our kitty down last week (very sad) and we thought it had kind of gone over O's head since he wasn’t too troubled the day it happened. But tonight, he wanted kitty back.

O: “Where is kitty?”

Me: “Oliver, he’s gone now. He died.”

O: “How much did he die?”

Me: “All the way.”

O: “Oh.”

O: “I want kitty back.”

So we hugged. Sometimes talking is good, and sometimes hugging is better.

01/28/2011

Potty training is going really well around here. When we remove diapers and put on underpants, Oliver is momentarily awed by the significance of the switch, and promises with the straightest of faces to let us know when he needs to pee or poo. And then he crawls into a box or makes his way behind the couch to “do nothing,” except that nothing ends with a puddle on the floor. We can catch it if we’re watching like hawks, but if we turn our heads for a second we’re headed for some mop time and hosing-down-of-Oliver time.

Sometimes he does deign to make his way over to the pot for a pee, and there is much cheering and doling out of treats. But poop is another matter. When asked why he won’t, these are the standard excuses: “I just don’t want to,” “Maybe later,” “I’m scared of falling in.” My gentle pestering (and it is gentle, because I don’t want to encourage still more resistance in the most stubborn child who has ever lived) gets me nowhere, and in fact yesterday, it got me mocked.

I put on a bright, overly sunshiny face when I noticed him doing the telltale wriggling and squirming, and said in the most animated of tones, with eyebrows raised to my hairline:

“I know! I have the MOST EXCITING idea! Let’s go to the pot and do a poop there! Let’s!!!”

Oliver looked at me, screwed up his face into a perfect parody of mine, then matched my tone exactly:

“No I know! I have the MOST NOT NICE idea! Let’s stay on the carpet and do a poop here!”

What am I going to do with that? How do you not break into laughter and applaud the kid on his burn? He will eventually go poop in the potty (right?). Until then, I think we’re going to hope those Size 6 Huggies have a little stretch and understand that Oliver’s not going to be taken in by bribery or over-the-top encouragement. This boy is on his own track, in pooping and in life.